Friday 25 October 2013 14.00 EDT
First published on Friday 25 October 2013 14.00 EDT

Contrary to the idea that Jim Ratcliffe is a secretive figure who flits between tax haven and luxury yacht, he has quite a large presence on YouTube. There the founder, chief executive and chairman of Ineos can be found talking about the business philosophy and strategy that in just 15 years has made Ineos one of the world's largest petrochemical companies, with 51 sites in 11 countries, and Ratcliffe himself among Britain's richest industrialists, one of the few born in Britain to matter globally. He turned 61 last week, but looks younger: a tall, lean figure with abundant hair who likes to run and is a passionate supporter of Manchester United, which together with his northern grammar-school education and degree in chemical engineering from Birmingham makes a kind of demotic ideal, as well as someone who typifies the Britain that might have been had it cherished manufacturing. As it is, he is hardly a patriot. To reduce Ineos's tax bill, he moved the company's HQ to Switzerland in 2010, and he makes no secret of his pessimism over Britain's future either in speeches or interviews with the company magazine. Grangemouth workers and Unite officials would have been wise to visit YouTube and take note. Perhaps they did, or perhaps from other sources already had the measure of the man they were dealing with. Then the question becomes: how did they make their mistake?

Accepting an award for his "outstanding contribution to the petrochemical industry" in Texas this summer, Ratcliffe spoke of his belief that "a successful economy must have a strong manufacturing base" and that Britain's lack of one was demonstrated by its poor post-crash performance compared to Germany. The collapse of UK manufacturing had been "quite depressing". Fifteen years before, manufacturing's share of both economies had been roughly the same at around 22-25%, and while that proportion still persisted in Germany, the share in the UK had dropped to 10%, because, as Ratcliffe said, "the government wasn't particularly focused on manufacturing", and countries needed Unique Selling Points if manufacturing was to succeed there.

And what USPs, what attractions over its rivals, did the UK have? Ratcliffe could think of very few, apart perhaps from the English language. "Because taxes are relatively high, the unions are difficult, pensions are expensive, and energy costs are extremely expensive." He contrasted the situation with the US, which had "lots and lots" of USPs. "A very big market, skilled labour, a very energetic workforce, unions [that] are sensible, pensions [that] are sensible." And beyond all those, advantages a new and "enormously strong" USP, which was the cheap energy and cheap petrochemical feedstock produced by exploiting – that is, by fracking – the US's large reserves of shale gas, which is two thirds cheaper than Europe's natural gas, and seen increasingly as the springboard for an American industrial renaissance.

Ratcliffe predicted that most of Ineos's investment would gravitate towards the US, which was already generating half the company's profits, leaving European plants "in a difficult place" unless cheap US feedstock (raw material) could be imported. In Norway, a new terminal now being built by Ineos at its Rafnes chemical plant should take its first shipments of American ethane in 2015. A similar new terminal at Grangemouth, partly financed by grants and loan guarantees from the Scottish and UK governments, would ensure the long-term future of Scotland's last big manufacturing site, which presently draws its diminishing and much more expensive supply of methane from the North Sea. But the scheme's go-ahead depended on the workforce agreeing to reduced earnings and pensions at a plant said to be losing £10m a month. Taking a beady look at fixed costs has always been a key part of Ratcliffe's philosophy; acquiring businesses that were subsidiaries of blue-chip companies such as ICI and BP, he noticed how loose they were with money: "Most [of them] couldn't spell cash," he said in one interview.

How sincerely he wanted Grangemouth reformed rather than Grangemouth closed has sometimes looked debatable. In 2008, industrial action defeated the management when it tried to push through similar changes, which led to speculation that Ratcliffe wanted revenge, and wanted shot of a factory that has wearied him with its problems. There are historic parallels. The miners and the printers managed to defeat threats to their earnings and job security until certain externals changed – carefully stockpiled or cheaply imported coal in the first case and computer technology in the second. The existential threat to Grangemouth and every other European petrochemical plant is America's shale gas. The memory of Wapping, in which the printers took Murdoch's goad and struck, only to find their labour suddenly and permanently unnecessary, should have hovered in the smoke rising from that muddy plain beside the Forth.

But what would you have done in the circumstance? Rejected the terms, believing the closure threat to be a negotiating stance? Half of Grangemouth's 1,300 workers seem to have believed that, mistakenly. Or agreed straight off to everything the management wanted, thereby acknowledging that in a world where capital is footloose and fancy-free, and can move production almost anywhere, organised labour has very little power? That would have been sensible, if only because it might have thwarted any devious ploy to be rid of you, but you might not have felt good about yourself as a loser in the crude binary tradition of industrial relations.

In 1971, the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders seized the public imagination because it contradicted conventional trade union behaviour by keeping men at work in defiance of orders to send them home. Perhaps Unite needed to do something similar at Grangemouth – some action or piece of theatre that suggested the union knew the plant's survival was a bigger cause than the preservation of their members' excellent pension arrangements. Or perhaps we should just face the fact that in a case like this surrender to the owner's demands is the only option. Neoliberalism and the global market rule; the state is everywhere in retreat; neither the UK nor the Scottish government could have dissuaded Ineos from closing Grangemouth in the absence of union compliance, and this would have been just as true in an independent Scotland as a devolved one. Nationalisation would work only at the cost of large public subsidy or/and the same cuts to staffing costs as Ineos proposed. A new buyer, if any could be found, would face the same difficulty. The immovable facts are that they make the stuff much cheaper across the Atlantic and that free trade has become our sacred ideology, which in a country that has turned its face against making things is a peculiar act of disempowerment.

I first saw Grangemouth as a small boy. From the hill behind our house you could see it flaring in the dark a dozen miles upriver. Many industries lit up the sky above Scotland in those days – the Ravenscraig steel mill, the Parkhead Forge, the Clyde Ironworks – though none as spectacularly as what has turned out to be the last of them. Coloured lights, flames, steam, smoke and burnished steel: it made Scotland modern. The relief is enormous that it still continues.